It hasn’t garnered the same fawning press coverage of a show like Ted Lasso or the adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. Nevertheless, For All Mankind has not only proven to be one of the most stable and longest-running success stories on Apple TV+, offering four (and soon to be five) seasons that tell an alternate history of the US-Soviet space race. The show, which continues to enjoy Rotten Tomatoes scores above 90%, is also about to get a spinoff.
Apple announced Star City, For All Mankind‘s forthcoming spinoff series, on Tuesday, in tandem with word that the original show is coming back for a fifth season. Moreover, For All Mankind creators Ben Nedivi, Matt Wolpert, and Ronald D. Moore are behind the new series, which will focus on the other side of this franchise’s universe — specifically, by telling the story of the Soviet space program.
“Our fascination with the Soviet space program has grown with every season of For All Mankind,” executive producers Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi said in a statement about the new show. “The more we learned about this secret city in the forests outside Moscow where the Soviet cosmonauts and engineers worked and lived, the more we wanted to tell this story of the other side of the space race. We could not be more excited to continue building out the alternate history universe of For All Mankind with our partners at Apple and Sony.”
Honestly, it doesn’t come as a surprise that Apple wants to keep the For All Mankind universe going like this. Season 4 of the original show, for example, still holds a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing. And a spinoff like Star City represents a creative opportunity to branch out into all-new territory.
Apple describes the spinoff series as a “propulsive paranoid thriller that takes us back to the key moment in the alt-history retelling of the space race.” Specifically, when the Soviet Union (in this imagined retelling) was the first nation to put a man on the moon.
For All Mankind told the American side of that story. Star City will do the same from behind the Iron Curtain, showcasing the lives of cosmonauts, engineers, and intelligence officers embedded in the Soviet space program who took risks and made bold leads in their quest to propel humanity forward.
